News

With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.

Phase-1 upgrades for the CMS detector, including the work of the UW CMS Trigger Team, are approved for construction with the attainment of the DOE Critical Decision 2/3 for a $43M project. Profs. Wesley Smith and Sridhara Dasu are leading the calorimeter trigger upgrade efforts at UW. The success is in part due to excellent hardware and firmware designed by UW engineers. Featured here is this year's UW academic staff award winner Mr. Tom Gorski's CTP7 board, sporting the highest-end Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Virtex-7 and ZYNQ from Xilinx Inc.

Wisconsin group played a leading role in presenting evidence for Higgs coupling to fermions. Graduate students Joshua Swanson and Isobel Ojalvo, undergraduate student Stephane Coopertein did crucial work on Higgs decays to tau-leptons. Prof. Sridhara Dasu co-led the CMS group that performed this analysis.

Two students in the Department of Physics have received Hilldale Faculty/Undergraduate Research Fellowships for 2014-15 academic year: Aaron Stemo, working with Professor Cary Forest, and Nicholas Derr, working with Drs. Susan Nossal and Edwin Mierkiewicz.

UW physicists are hard at work upgrading the trigger system for the CMS experiment at the LHC, which is in the middle of a maintenance period in preparation for higher energy collisions in 2016. Graduate student Tom Perry takes a break from this work to give the public an explanation of what the trigger system is, using a bowl of party mix.

A 2D array of up to 49 atomic qubits is being used for entanglement and quantum computing experiments.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

A 2D array of up to 49 atomic qubits is being used for entanglement and quantum computing experiments. The array is loaded stochastically and the movie shows digitized data of single atom occupancies in the array.